My scream echoed through the house. She wouldn’t come. She hadn’t left the city in thirty years. I could not imagine her finding her way across town, let alone to my neck of the woods.
Disgruntled and in a thoroughly foul mood, I returned to the kitchen, replaced the coffee with some brandy I found under the sink, powered up my laptop, and attempted to work.
* * *
Brandy on the table before me, beside my laptop, open to my article on the compromised mentality of right-wing conservative Christians, which wasn’t going anywhere, while the sunlight drained from the sky, replaced by stars.
I had waited two days for Mother. For some reason I’d gotten my hopes up—even though I knew she couldn’t drive. But still I’d cultivated the tiniest spark of anticipation. If she came then she loved me. For once I wasn’t the “demon” she thought me to be. But if she didn’t come, I was forsaken.
Naturally, I had succumbed to a morose feeling of rejection and self-loathing.
I closed my laptop. I gripped the brandy glass, gulped back liquid; an old, familiar state to find myself in: pissed off and feeling powerless.
A tap on the window made me jump. I looked outside as night fell. I saw a figure moving away through the darkness. I squinted for a better look… yes, someone out in the yard… slipping behind a tree trunk. Since moving in I had seen the strange silhouettes on the nearby hilltop. Wasn’t clear who they were. Nor was it clear exactly what they were up to. All I had heard was their hammering and hacking. But now one had ventured up to the house.
I leaped away from the table and grabbed my coat, rushing out into the night. The moon hung like a crooked bone overhead. Fingertip pines swayed in the wind.
I marched across the grass, determined. But the elusive figure stayed a step ahead, his shadow weaving in and out of the trees. I thought of calling out but I wasn’t sure if he was attempting to escape, or luring me. Either way, I didn’t want to give myself away: an element of surprise could mean everything.
I tailed him up the weed-choked incline of the hill, where I noticed a bonfire. Reaching the crest, I crouched behind a rock pile, secreting myself.
The figure joined several others, a band of men gathered around the bonfire, and I knew at once it was these men I had observed on certain nights. They looked bizarre, adorned in unusual clothes. I had to study them for some time between snatches of flickering shadowlight before I realized they were—
Knights.
Templar Knights.
There was no denying it. I’d read of the secret Order in Uncle’s religious books. Had even seen illustrations. The men on the hill wore trademark tunics, surcoats, and capes. White turbans wrapped their heads. Emboldened red Templar crosses dominated the fabric covering their torsos and backs. Several men clutched large white shields, upon which the red cross glimmered. All had imposing long swords attached to their hips.
I watched, fascinated, as they moved about, speaking to one another in a French dialect. At one point two men stalked into the trees, returning with several heavy beams and a burlap sack.
They laid the beams on the ground overlapping each other. Then they emptied the contents of the sack: spikes, mallets, ropes, nails. The five other knights joined the two, and together they grabbed tools and set to work.
I looked past them and noticed that Uncle’s hanging tree was missing, a splintered stump where its trunk had been.
Then the horror hit me.
The knights were building a cross.
* * *
I was enchanted. I knew I should leave, but I stayed where I was—even when one knight began digging in the ground, preparing a placement hole for the vertical stake.
I heard something at my rear: a twig snapping. Was that the fire? I re-counted the knights on the hilltop: one, two, three, four, five, six—
The seventh was missing…
Could he—
My answer came in a swiftly dropping metallic sword hilt against the back of my head. Pain exploded through me, down my spine. I saw tiny fireworks and tasted blood in my mouth.
The blow came again—crack!
The forest swung sideways as warm blood trickled down my neck and shoulders.
I toppled onto my side in the grass, losing sight of the cross behind the rock pile.
* * *
I saw fire. Night sky framed in tree branches, peppered with stars. Faces of the knights as they huddled over me, stolid expressions, calmest eyes. For a moment I visualized being surrounded by lions, until their hands clasped me; fixed me; tied. My wrists and my feet were bound. Tightness pulled at the muscles in my back.
Pain: the worst pain. Could this really be happening? I thought the Christ had come to save me, love me, free me from suffering—but instead the knights’ mallets rose and crashed down, driving nails through my skin, bones, ligaments.
I felt myself opening like a tortured red flower. Blood, my life force, seeping out, saturating the ground, forming a wet puddle that smelled like copper and mud. For some reason the smell made me want to cry. Then I was crying, sobbing; all I could think about was running away.
I struggled, flailing my limbs, but the nails pulled my flesh and ripped the skin. It was useless: the pain was too great, the hands too many.
“Get off me!” I shouted. “Lemme go!”
But the knights only continued their work, solemnly binding my quivering body to the cross. The texture of the beams threatened to make me sick as I imagined Uncle Lewis dangling dead from them once, back when they were still a tree. I closed my eyes and bit my tongue, tasting soft, slithery flesh.
I thought my screams would never end.
* * *
Then they were hoisting, lifting the wide T-shape up into the night, as shadows flickered against the crosspiece. I heard more hammering as they secured the pole to the ground. It was hard to think straight, hard even to see straight for the feelings of pain were so intense. I thought someone was screaming until I realized it was me. I could not have stopped even if I’d wanted to—it just went on and on, fueled by the burning tightness coursing through my body.
I managed to turn my head… and yes… it was true.
I was crucified.
Just like the Christ.
The Templar Knights gathered around the erected cross, some leaning on shields, the rest with swords drawn, blades extended. They began chanting and I screamed again, though my throat was hoarse from dehydration.
How long had this gone on?
The sky looked dark as ever, but the pain had somehow starved me. I felt sick, desiccated, weak. The knights had removed my clothing. My body sagged, covered in sweat.
One knight, sheathing his blade, approached. He lifted a mallet from the ground, pounding at the nails in my feet, securing them to the vertical pole. I locked up my jaw in agony, shooting drool through clenched teeth. The knight positioned a large firewood log upright, stood on it to reach my hand/wrist nails, and gently tapped them in.
I suddenly remembered the toy wooden tool set I’d had as a child. I used to sit in my bedroom, hammering wooden nails into round pre-made holes—anything to escape Mother’s injurious taunts and accusations. The wood piece and the nails had fit together perfectly. They were one. I found this to be a nice symbol. Most of my childhood had felt like a separation: from Mother, from the kids at school, from a father who’d died before I was born.
The Christ and I might become one.
I let this symbol carry me, as finally the pain became too much… and I passed out.
* * *
My suffering was everything. I wore it about me like an auric shroud. I was no longer me but watched myself from outside, detached, disassociated.
If I checked, though, I could pinpoint certain critical spots whence the pain surged outward like rays from the sun. A pounding headache burned all the way to the muscles around my spine—which was bent uncomfortably, strained.
My wrists were being gnawed by large rodents; so were my legs and feet, only
the pain here was double because I was supporting myself by standing on a platform attached to the cross. The added weight felt like a claw pulling me down into Hell, and I wondered if the rodents were really there at all.
I rose my head from its weary perch and cast my eyes afar at the sun coming in above the trees. Birds whistled. The bonfire was reduced to ashes, which the wind tossed about. The Templars had gone, tools carted off with them.
A new figure came up the hill. Holding something long. Mother reached the crest and stopped at the base of the cross. She looked old, yet strangely rejuvenated.
In one hand she clutched a heavy wooden spear; in the other a fuzzy pink Plushie.
“You’re missing the crown,” she said.
I leveled my eyes. I tried to speak but nothing came out.
She shrugged. “Oh well. They got the rest right.”
She moved closer and placed her hand on my skin.
“I did this for you,” she said. “I know you probably don’t see it that way. But it’s true. The dream I told you about—where Christ said I had given birth to a demon—that never left me. I felt sorry for you. I knew something had to be done. So I sent you here.”
My ears pricked up. My tongue still refused to work, but at least I could look at her.
“It’s true,” she said, and sighed. “It was all a game. I told my brother to leave this place to you in his will. Then after I had him killed, I urged you to come live here. To find Christ. Then I prepared the ritual. And here we stand at the end of it.”
She chuckled. “Well, one of us is standing.”
I wanted to scream at her, bash her brains out. What was she saying, that she had caused this? Was that even possible?
I lifted my chin higher, and finally my tongue began to stir. I felt words rising in me and I thought about chastising her, demanding expiation.
But at that moment she took up the spear in both hands, dropping the Plushie. She leveled her shoulders and charged toward me, plunging the metal tip into my side, just below the rib cage. A spring of blood erupted over her. I tilted my head back, howling.
My eyelids squeezed in pain. I bore my face to the heavens, begging them to open up and admit me.
“Oh no you don’t,” Mother growled, digging with the spear.
I felt the life leaking out of me, drained away by pain and agony. I forced one eye open… and with the last of my strength I managed to look… and I saw…
A hand reaching down from the sky.
TREE OF LIFE
… light.
That’s the first thing I see. And a tree. A crooked assortment of branches sprouting from roots toward the sky, where the light is, where clouds tear apart like shrouds of mist. I’m reminded of my mother, Judith, and her soft brown eyes, which once nurtured me through the trials of my youth.
Where are those eyes now?
The delicate blanket of light covers the crowning of leaves. The light is beautiful to look at. I feel heavy warmth falling over me like an angel’s wing. My mother isn’t with me anymore; there is only this heavenly light.
And then I’m amongst the roots in the earth. But I’m not alone. There are many—hundreds of us—small colorful bodies like translucent fetuses with vaguely humanoid appendages, orbiting half-visible in the underground streams. We dance around the roots, in places of pooling water, in notches carved out of sediment.
The root matrix spirals over my head. When I look up I see it coiling and untwining. It is only one tree—a Great Tree. A glorious pillar of bark and branches, with millions of wide glittering leaves. Its crown seems to reach to the heavens, to penetrate the sky with its luxuriant bloom.
Others begin to climb, and I climb too. Our upward momentum is like a storm, a blustering wind of thought and emotion. I see heartache in their gestures as, monkeylike, they ascend the roots. For the Great Tree is isolated in this Spirit Country. But together we are willing ourselves out of the darkness. And at the crown, light spills over the golden leafage, probing the cloudy heights. At the apex, the last circle is a portal leading out of this strange world up to something much greater.
The air breathes to me: Keter.
I kneel. I feel love in my knees, which is strange. I’ve never felt love in my body. I’ve only felt it in my mind, yet there it is in my limbs. How odd that it should be alive, sensations like homey comfort in my bones and blood.
Love rises, as we too rise, along the surface of the roots, which swell to the size of mountains over the spectral landscape.
I’m drawn up off my knees. Soon this feeling will pass through my stomach, into my heart. And afterwards up my throat to my head. Can I stand it? Can I experience love outside my mind?
What is this? a mystic vision? a hallucinatory dream?
I don’t know. Something must be wrong. My family should be here with me. They were standing beside my hospital bed. Until the light swallowed them…
Now phasing through transparent soil, the mighty trunk rears its lofty mass. My fellow travelers come with me, ringing around the gnarled bole, which rises before us like a medieval tower. Maybe they are my family. They may not look like Sarah and the girls, but they certainly feel like family. So confusing.
I hear music. A whispering sound, like a choir of wind. The voices are so sweet, so resonant.
Keter
Chokhmah
Binah
Chesed
Gevurah
Tiferet
Netzach
Hod
Yesod
Malkuth
Words that make no sense, which are almost incomprehensible, sounds like something a baby would make. And yet they are vaguely familiar. I realize they are Hebrew.
Mother had been Jewish. And her sister, Aunt Carmela, spoke words very similar to these when she got upset while babysitting me, back when Mom waitressed tables and dropped me off at Aunt Carmela’s on her way to work. Long before Dad had been laid in the ground in his army uniform.
Aunt Carmela had been a practicing Kabbalist and she tried to explain her spiritual philosophy to me when I was older: what the Hebrew words meant and where the true Jewish faith was supposed to culminate. I believe these are the same words now being sung. And I believe they are inscribed upon the trunk of the Great Tree, leading up to its crown, for I see several blooming rings of color which bear the sacred letters.
I suddenly remember that the Hebrew words denote different pathways to God, each signifying a distinctive “emanation” of the Divine. Keter is the sphere closest to God, and it is the ultimate destination for some Kabbalists, who believe they can reenter this emanation by overcoming and connecting the other spheres of desires, emotions, virtues, and constructs of divine creative force.
By connecting the pathways—Keter, Chokhmah, Binah, Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth—a veracious aspirant can ascend to the realm of the Divine, starting with Malkuth and working backwards through the creative process until ending at Keter, merging finally with the godhead and becoming one with the ‘I Am.’
I’m not sure how I know all this. I had never embraced my Jewish heritage, although I enjoyed listening to Aunt Carmela speak. And yet I never fully grasped what she tried to tell me. I couldn’t decide one way or the other if Moses, HaShem, Jesus Christ, Buddha, Allah, or any of the rest of them actually existed. How could I put my faith in something for which there was no proof? And yet science offered me no absolutions, either.
Was it any wonder I felt so lost?
Could Sarah and the girls blame me for what I did?
The ten Hebrew words continue cycling in the air again and again, sung by my fellow travelers, all of whom grow to become like little children. I can barely make them out. Their squat, ghostly forms move swiftly as they twirl, dance, and leap. Sometimes they move so quickly that all I can discern is the colorful trail streaming behind each.
Watching them reminds me of something: I was a child once.
But now that memory, like those playfu
l spirits, is ghostly. I only recall the images of childhood in a kind of foggy veil. I feel somehow cheated by this as if I’ve lost something precious that was vouchsafed to me. I know the world seemed different all those years ago. It seemed more like this world, with its roots and streams, its auric clouds and towering ancient tree. That world was magic, and then it died. And I died, too. Would Sarah forgive me? I do miss her. I miss my little girls. I could never live in a world of weekend visitations, one bedroom apartments, and no loving wife to come home to, and so I did it: I took myself out of a godless unfair world. And I find myself with the spirits now, traveling through this Spirit Country, and things are looking up—literally.
But I still miss my family.
As the tornado of capering child-ghosts ascends the trunk, the clouds poised over the crown part further. It happens symmetrically—a perfect circle opens in the sky. The gold of the sun spills through and reflects off the leaves. Glaring spears of hot light ray outward.
And then I see faces, giant androgynous faces gazing down from the cloud opening. They look so kind, so soft and gentle and noble. The faces of angels. I recognize some, recalled from some existence I must’ve lived long ago, which was like a dream—which was a dream. A dream of flipping through pages of the Hebrew Bible, then closing the covers and telling my mother: “No.”
We lift ourselves up, all of us children, scaling the ancient bark of the tree, rising toward the soft faces in the sky. The loving feeling has spread from my arms and legs and has entered my stomach and simmers there. Next it’s in my lungs, journeying through my throat to my head, and when it twines its fingers into my skull I become conscious of a low reverberating hum, which rattles my teeth and vibrates the backs of my eyes.
The cavorting children around me start to grow until they reach the height of adults. But I still hear their wondrous laughter, ghostly giggles, and devotional recitation of the Hebrew words. They dance and bend into each other, streaming all as a unit like the colors of a rainbow.
Aberrations of Reality Page 16
